Survival of the Fittest
Note on the text: I used Stevan Pasero’s 2025 book Musical Darwinism as published by Soundlink Entertainment
“To know your future, you must know your past” (12).
This is a really interesting book about the history of the music industry. Streaming has upended the music industry. In a world where CDs, record contracts, and the traditional music market no longer rule the way they once used to, many musicians are struggling to figure out how to make a living:
With the emergence of digital distribution services like Napster, Pandora, and iTunes, artist royalties became fragmented, dwindling from dollars to mere pennies, and eventually fractions of pennies or even nothing at all. These harsh realities of digital music left many working class musicians and their families struggling to survive. These harsh realities result was a mass exodus, with countless musicians [being] forced to abandon their careers and seek new ways to make a living (3).
Stevan Pasero is a prolific musician in his own right and here he attempts to outline what the music industry can do to survive in the digital age by retracing its steps and seeing how it has grown from the days of troubadours going from town to town to the billion dollar industry it is today.
Music is a powerful thing. Something that can truly “express the inexpressible” and convey “ideas and emotions that transcend language, logic, and time” (1). How many people have, for example, put on an Eminem cd as a way to channel their rage, rocked out to “Despacito” despite not knowing a word of Spanish, or let themselves get washed away in the sounds Handel’s Messiah despite the fact that it was written almost 300 years ago? Darwin was right when he said that “the ability to create music must be ranked amongst the most mysterious [and powerful] gifts with which the human being is endowed” (2).
Stevan talks about his own experience of the lasting power of music he talks about the first CD he ever released which was a transcription, for guitar, of Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker which he did in the mid 1970s. The CD wound up selling so well that he was able to start his own music label, Sugo Music, which was named after his mom’s famous sugo pasta sauce. It’s an incredible testament to the lasting power of good music. The fact that almost 100 years later, Tchaikovsky’s famous ballet about a young girl who turns into a princess is still so popular that people want to learn how to play it on guitar is incredible.
The first thing Stevan talks about is the effect that the invention of the printing press in the 1440s had on the music industry. Prior to that musicians could only hear music live, and if they wanted to learn how to play that song they either had to get someone to teach them or have the money to pay someone who knew how to write, like a monk, to undertake the arduous tasks and hand copying the music industry question. The printing press changed all of that. The printing press democratized the information in such a way that it became for more people to become musicians than ever before. Ever since then every century has brought on new challenges and technical innovations that has forced the music industry to change in various ways.
From 1857 when Leon Scott de Martinville invented the phonoautogram, the first machine capable of recording sound, until the Great Depression, the music industry experienced highs like it never had before. By 1929 in fact there was 140 million records being sold annually in an industry that was less than a hundred years old. But then the Great Depression happened “where the music industry experienced a drastic decline in record sales, with an astounding 95% drop from 140 million units [being sold annually] in 1927 to a mere 6 million by 1932 (39). It was at this moment in American music history that radio came to save the day.
Radio, much like streaming nearly 80 years later, answered a particular problem. People wanted to still listen to their music, but didn’t have the means to go out and buy all the records. Radios quickly became an essential household fixture to the point that they were retroactively dubbed “the Internet of the 30s” and “as markets tumbled and the record industry crashed, radio broadcasts boomed. At the start of the Great Depression 40 percent of Americans owned a radio, but by its end this number had doubled to 80” (41). In fact many historians credit radio with saving the music industry by “keeping consumers connected to their favorite recording artists and songwriters [and] many record labels turned to selling radios instead of records to survive” (41-42).
Another surprising, unsung, hero of this era was the jukebox. Jukeboxes offered people both an opportunity to create a playlist of their favorite songs by paying to play those songs on a per song basis, and to introduce themselves to songs and genres that they otherwise would not have been exposed to. Jukeboxes sold so well in fact that “by 1935 [they] accounted for one third of all domestic record sales” (42).
Cassette tapes, invented in the late 60s, represented yet another change in the musical frontier. Cassettes gave people, for the first time, to really acts as their own DJs and create their own mixtapes which they could then take with them wherever they went. Cassettes gave people a particular type of relationship to their music that simply wasn’t possible with vinyl in a way that is again very similar to the way people experience their music in the digital age that we now live in. People could create mixtapes that reflected whatever their mood was: want to workout? Here’s a mixtape for that. Want to tell the girl that you love how much you love her? Here’s a mixtape for that. Want to cry your eyes out because you’re heart broken that your girlfriend left you? Here’s a mixtape for that. All that started here.
So then things slowly turn back to the question that started it all: what do we do now? Well the first thing is to remember that the music industry has undergone many seismic shifts and survived which means it is capable of great change. This is not the end of the music industry. It will just have to change and adapt like it always has. The second thing to notice is that the through line through all of this is the music itself. The music has always been there, needling its way through the hearts of the artists who produce it into the ears of the listeners who need it. And it always will be.
At the end of the story Stevan talks about a young artist he was mentoring who asked him what she needed to do to stay afloat as a musician in these trying times. His answer was both simple and surprising:
It’ll take a couple hundred thousand streams to pay your monthly rent, [but] remember [that] billions of music listeners across 200 hundred countries listen to music daily. So the math is on your side. Just keep writing, performing, and staying connected to your growing fanbase (139).
It reminds me of an interview that Dave Grohl, the drummer from Nirvana and lead singer from the Foo Fighters, gave years ago where he said that his advice to aspiring musicians is always to just go play live. That no matter what is happening in the world, or even in the music industry, there will always be a primal connection the music and the people, and that so long as you, the musician, can find a way to connect the people to the music you are making then you’ll be fine because your fans will follow you wherever you go. The industry has already changed a million times and will change a million before it’s through. But the music, and specifically the power it has over people, has never changed and it never will. So the answer regarding how to keep moving forward even in the industry as it stands today is pretty simple: just keep making music. To paraphrase the great line from Field of Dreams if you make it they will come.
